Josephine Baker (30 page)

Al Jolson's two-year-old
The Jazz Singer
had finally made it across the ocean, and Maurice Chevalier could be seen—and heard—in
The Love Parade
. Audiences flocked to both, although French critics were wary. “
La nature est une grande dame dont la voix ne peut être rapportée
,” said one.

If the voice of the grande dame, nature, could not be reproduced, neither could the legs of the grande dame, Mistinguett. They were insured by Lloyd's of London for five hundred thousand francs, the price of a brownstone on the Champs-Élysées. When Pepito and Josephine came home, Miss was starring in
Paris-Miss
at the Casino de Paris, then being run by Henri Varna and Oscar Dufrenne. (Varna and Dufrenne, who were gay, put on splendid, over-opulent productions. The Casino women were put on pedestals, draped in silks and furs and feathers; even the nude scenes gave the impression that they were dressed.)

In January 1930, Pepito's mother died, within three months of his father's death. Josephine grieved with Pepito; the Abatinos had loved and accepted her. But his sadness did not deflect Pepito from his purpose, pushing Josephine to develop her gifts. “I needed to be constantly in motion,” she said, “driving my roadster . . . running through the fields with my dogs. It was my way of expressing joy at being alive. What was the point of standing behind a piano practicing scales?”

Pepito told her the point. “Think of all the names that
used
to be in lights. The public is like a man. We're happy to stick with one woman as long as she keeps changing!” Bananas had served their purpose, it was time for “sensitivity, songs, feeling . . . I think you're ready.”

By sheer accident, she got the chance to show she was ready. “Oscar Dufrenne used to pick up his newspapers in front of the Paramount Cinema,” says Jean Sablon, the popular French singer. “And Dufrenne told me that one day he heard two people ask the paper seller, ‘Do you still have the 1926 souvenir program of the Folies-Bèrgere with Josephine Baker?' The news dealer said no, ‘I never have enough. As soon as I get some, they're gone.'

“Dufrenne went home and phoned Varna. ‘We must engage Josephine.' And that's how she started all over again.”

Once more, she was in the right place at the right time. The new revue,
Paris Qui Remue
(Bustling Paris), would be built around the forthcoming Exposition Coloniale, the purpose of which was to celebrate France's empire. Who better than Josephine, adopted daughter of the colonies, to represent the fever of the African jungle?

She followed Mistinguett into the Casino, a huge opportunity. Pierre Meyer, her new leading man, was very good-looking, Jean Sablon told me. “And his family was rich. He had a white Rolls, and a special piano Pleyel made for him in crystal.”

Pierre Meyer opened in the show, “but he did not want to sleep with Josephine, so she had him fired.”

She couldn't have the choreographer, Earl Leslie, fired, even though he was a boyfriend and dancing partner of Mistinguett, and Josephine considered him a spy in her camp. Mistinguett called Josephine “La Négresse,” Josephine referred to Mistinguett as “La Vieille” (The Old One), but the irony is that, in other circumstances, they might have been friends. Both came from poverty, both endured on-the-job training, both had style and wit. Twenty years later, Josephine spoke of her rival as a role model. “When I am . . . on the point of dropping, ready to throw it all over . . . I think about Mistinguett. And I stand up straight again. I accept that one must go on, work hard . . . survive.”

Survive, yes, surrender, never. Neither Josephine nor Mistinguett would permit anyone to compete with her onstage. Reviewing
Paris-Miss
, a critic had singled out the young American dancer Mona Lee, calling her “delicious.” After that, says Mona Lee, “Miss was a royal pain. I was twenty-four, she was already in her sixties, she could barely kick her leg up past her knee, but the public was always on her side.”

Josephine was equally combative. Bobby Mitchell, another American dancer, remembers Josephine trying to get a girl singer fired. “She raised hell, she wanted this girl out and her number struck. They didn't do it because they had a winner, but Josephine used to stand in the wings, and the girl's scene would come up, and you didn't need lighting, Josephine lit up the stage with her fury.”

The French singer left to marry a South American millionaire, which didn't sit well with Josephine either. “I remember a Sunday morning,” Bobby said, “a bunch of us chorus gypsies sitting around Josephine's apartment, and she's reading about the girl's wedding and she says, ‘That motherfucker.' It was funny because the night before at somebody's party, she had been so elegant.”

Though Oscar Dufrenne had suggested hiring Josephine, he confessed to his partner that he was worried. “Even if she sings, with that voice, what songs?” But Varna, watching the first rehearsal, as she took the stage and floated down the Casino's steep stairs (which were even trickier than the stairs at the Folies), exclaimed, “She can do anything!”

(Josephine did not entirely trust music hall audiences to recognize how much hard labor went into being able to do anything. “I'm afraid they don't really know,” she said, “how a dancer must constantly work to keep her form, renew her repertoire . . . move from dancing to singing.”)

The daughter of lyricist Geo Koger told me about the birth of the show's most famous song. “Vincent Scotto and my father were driving, and my father said, tentatively, ‘Two loves have I, my country and Paris,' and Scotto said, ‘What's that?' and they looked at each other and stopped the car. Scotto grabbed his guitar, they got out, ran under a
porte cochère
(it was raining), and wrote “J'ai Deux Amours.”

“When Josephine sang ‘J'ai Deux Amours,' ” the actress Line Clevers told me, “it was the sun arriving onstage.”

René Lefevre concurred. Himself a popular performer, he had known Josephine since
La Revue Nègre
. “I was half in love with her from the first day I saw her at rehearsal. Once, when I organized a charity in Montrouge, she agreed to participate, and she sang and sang, and had a triumph. The mayor said, ‘Ah, Josephine, what pleasure you gave us, what can we give you in return?' At that moment, a couple was dancing on the stage, the man was very handsome, and Josephine pointed to him and said, ‘I would like you to give me that!' The mayor was flabbergasted.

“People were crazy about Josephine, the women were not even jealous. How could you not like such a person? She was beauty itself.” Pepito, on the other hand, got low marks from Lefevre. “He made her life hard, he was skinny, yellow, but Josephine, ah, she was a little island bird.”

By this time, despite the disapproval of friends like Lefevre, Josephine had settled into a kind of domesticity with Pepito. Taking Varna's advice, they bought a house on avenue Bugeaud in the sixteenth
arrondissement
, rented out apartments for income, and kept the top floor for their personal use. They also bought the villa Le Beau Chêne in the suburb of Le Vésinet. It was a mansion surrounded by lawn and trees. A little river ran through the property, and the tub in Josephine's
bathroom was covered in silver plate. But, she said, “I was forced to leave my green oasis daily and hurry to the rue de Clichy and Monsieur Varna's colorful, hectic world.”

The world of
Paris Qui Remue
. When Varna showed her a sketch of the costume—two enormous white-feathered wings—for her first number, and a drawing of the set featuring a steep ramp, she was alarmed. “I'll never get down that wearing these wings.” As soon as the choreographer agreed—“She's right, Henri”—Josephine changed her mind. “I looked at him coldly. How little he knew me! Precisely because he had said I couldn't navigate the steps, I would!”

In the number, Josephine played a bird pursued by hunters. They caught her, tore off her wings, and left her helpless on the ground. (Her crippled state would move theatergoers to tears.) There followed a scene about a Vietnamese girl, mistress of a Frenchman, and in it, Josephine sang “La Petite Tonkinoise” while wearing a gilded costume. “J'ai Deux Amours” then made its appearance in a sketch called “Ounawa” where Josephine, a native in an African forest, flirted with the white Pierre Meyer. Until Meyer got his walking papers, anyway. Josephine considered her real costar a cheetah.

The cheetah, called Chiquita (he was male, in spite of his name), had been ordered from Hamburg. “It will be marvelous publicity,” Varna told Josephine. “You can take him everywhere with you.” She did, she even took him home.

The poster made by Zig for
Paris Qui Remue
features a naked Josephine, bracelets up her left arm, an avalanche of feathers falling down her body, two strings of pearls curling across her hips. Chiquita sits on his hind legs like a tame dog, offering Josephine a bouquet.

Eugene Jenkins, an American musician, recalls seeing Josephine with Chiquita “about eleven o'clock one morning on the Champs-Élysées. And all of a sudden there were about a thousand people around her. Another time I saw her in Montmartre, she had been to a
boulangerie
, and she was standing in the street—she always had that kind of pouting thing, you know what I mean?—and all these people were saying, ‘Madame Baker, Madame Baker.' She could just stand still and command, a loaf of bread under her arm.”

The Casino's theater program was filled with ads for products endorsed by Josephine. Pepito had taken over all her business, everything was now in his name so she would be lawsuit-proof, and the money
rolled in. The chocolates she ate were made by Marquise de Sévigné, she was dressed by Maison Jane, her liquor was supplied by Cherry Jacky, her car was a Delage, her radio a Vitus. The secret of her coiffure was Le Bakerfix, a pomade to slick down hair. Over time, lending her name to this cream would bring her more cash than anything but her stage appearances.

As opening night approached, she grew tense. The dress rehearsal was a mess—“One of the chorus girls sprained an ankle, a costume in the ‘Electricity' number short-circuited, Chiquita chewed a hole in a dancer's trousers, and the wind machine broke down.”

And then it was upon her, September 26, 1930, and her fears proved to have been groundless. “I could hear the drums of the applause, I cried, ‘Thank you, thank you—' ”

In the wings, Varna waited. “But no, my little one,” he said as she came off. “You are not a street singer. . . . You don't thank people that way, you bow to the left, then to the right, with grace and dignity.”

The critics were as thrilled as the civilians. “She left us a
négresse
, droll and primitive, she comes back a great artist.” “The beautiful savage has learned to discipline her instincts. . . . Her singing, like a wounded bird, transported the crowd. . . .” (Over and over, we hear the bird comparison; it was to good effect that Josephine had studied Florence Mills and Yvonne Printemps, imitating their light, bright voices.)

Only Janet Flanner confessed regret at the pilgrim's progress. “She has, alas, almost become a little lady. Her caramel-colored body . . . has become thinned, trained, almost civilized. Her voice . . . is still a magic flute that hasn't yet heard of Mozart—though even that, one fears, will come with time. There is a rumor that she wants to sing refined ballads; one is surprised that she doesn't want to play Othello. On that lovely animal visage lies now a sad look, not of captivity, but of dawning intelligence.”

That intelligence focused more and more on craft. “With a song,” she said, “you can fill a big stage. It doesn't mean you have to wriggle like a frog. . . . I wanted to sing on my knees, alone, downstage, at the Casino de Paris. I won. But the pose must be true, nothing is good when it is artificial. The public asks to hear the beating of your heart between the notes.”

Before the opening, Josephine had sent Varna her own good-luck
charm, the nail with Dyer Jones's hair twisted around it. Varna, she said, “set me loose, but guided me, he gave me confidence.”

He also fretted about her free-wheeling private life, and implored Marcel Sauvage to have a talk with her.

“I too was upset by her sexual adventures,” Marcel told me. “I loved her like a brother, and I knew it was not good for her reputation to leave the theater, cross the street, and go to a cheap hotel with some man, in full view of everyone. Pepito was unhappy too, not only nursing his personal chagrin, but worrying about Josephine's image.

“Because she was often lonely in Le Beau Chêne, she would ask my wife, Paulette, and me to come and stay for a few days. The chauffeur would bring her home early in the morning, the maid would give her a bath, she would get into her beautiful bed and ask Paulette to hold her hand and tell her a fairy tale until she went to sleep. That beautiful bed, she told us, had belonged to Marie-Antoinette. ‘Marie-Antoinette slept in it with Louis XIV!' Her enthusiasm was not matched by her knowledge of history. Louis XIV died in 1715, Marie-Antoinette, who married Louis XVI, was not born until 1755.

“One day at Beau Chêne, thinking about what Varna had requested of me, I decided to beg her to be more discreet.

“She listened. Then, in a firm voice, she said, ‘Marcel, you may be the writer of my life, but my life belongs to me.' ”

Sauvage recalled one afternoon at Le Beau Chêne when many invited guests—including the novelist Erich Maria Remarque—had arrived to find no sign of their hostess. “Everyone was waiting in the salon, and she was still in bed. I went to get her. ‘I can't get up,' she said, ‘I'm tired. They should wait, and if they're hungry, they should eat.' She had her childish caprices. She
was
a child.”